I mean it would be a nice change for once to lose at the ending of an expansion. The Jailor wins we scratch our heads go back home deal with the next threat but expect the consequences of the defeat?
I mean wouldn’t it be refreshing for once to lose badly? We always have the bad guy we defeat him and move on to the next expansion, just became boring to always win.
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If we are to lose in any expansion, I’d say that we should do such in one that didn’t have the stakes as absurdly high as this one.
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Yes, it would be nice to lose for once. WoD would have been ideal for it, since we could have lost AU Draenor without having to change much else. The stakes were high in that we were about to lose a whole world, but they wouldn’t have been impactful on the game. A personal reminder of our foes’ might, not a devastated Azeroth.
No, losing in Shadowlands would be a terrible idea, since we really don’t want these antagonists to stick around and this specific story to accompany us another 2+ years.
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This is such a mood, damn.
Honestly? WoD wouldn’t be a bad place, but personally I think it would’ve been nice if we lost BFA. Selfishly, perhaps, because tentacled madness-inducing eldritch horrors are my jam, but also because they did my boy N’Zoth so dirty. Ny’alotha should’ve been an expansion and this is a hill I’m willing to die on.
Another bonus point is that I could forget Sylvanas for an expansion, which is something I dearly wish for.
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Reborn Black Empire all over Azeroth would have been great in a way, but to make it feeling real they would need to do a whole world revamp, and if cata is any indication this would stick around for 10+ years.
Not a fan of leveling twinks through tentacle madness^^
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We should have lost BFA with most of the main characters from the Alliance and Horde dead.
Then the next expansion would have been taking Azeroth back from the old Gods and fending of a void god incursion with a Light based mini expansion.
With the final WoW expansion being the rebuilding of Azeroth after retaking it from the Old gods .
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I really hope we… Lose Anduin, to the Jailer I mean. Or if we do recover him he is not the same as he used to be. I really hope that this experience leaves too huge a mark on him to heal, which is so painfully ironic considering he’s a priest!!!
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I think this could have worked perfectly. They could’ve even escalated the war further and instead of SL given us a full expansion about N’zoth Ny’alotha etc. The raid was very underwhelming for myself.
They could have tied so many thing in to madness spread from N’zoth and his cultists.
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Wouldn’t it be nice if we lost this expansion?
given the usual feedback, not much of value would be lost with no Shadowlands.
They can’t deliver an interesting ending even when it’s traditional. So, not sure how much I would trust the current narrative team with that.
He’s too shallow to care. And that would be a big contribution to how such twist would be perceived. If that would’ve been a villain like Kain in the Soul Reaver game, that would work fine. But… the Jailer is far from having any personality other than taking credit for the old story lines.
Like, when the devs promote story line of BfA with theme of justice and then, after they get money, go like “nah, no need to deliver it anymore”?
overall - eh. it depends on the execution. And execution when it comes to the story is not something I can call engaging or interesting. Too many retcons. Too much reliance on plot twists. Too much reliance on “we know better”, " it’s our story to tell", “wait and see” (in the game with constant cliffhanger, that avoids ending stories).
gl hf
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Augh, if only.
It would have been more of a goldmine than… whatever BFA ending was. I may be all high emotion if it did happen at the time, but i’d quickly grow a spine and see how good of a development it would have been.
N’zoth was awful. Not at all what it felt liek should’ve been. Bleh.
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Yeah as the others said, let’s lose, but not right now. Let’s win on all of the fronts in the Shadowlands as quick as possible so we can give its characters a happy ending so happy that we never have to interact with them and their afterlife issues ever again
Once this is done let’s lose!!!
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My idea would be that we beat Nzoth in the last raid of BFA but this was just a distraction and we only beat an avatar of Nzoth. When we beat the avatar Nzoth traps the raid group in his realm while taking over Azeroth with the world strongest fighting force trapped and not being able to stop it.
The other old gods are revived and the black empire rises again. The Horde and Alliance are destroyed with with only a couple of holdouts fighting a guerrilla war against the balck empire Thrall Baine Anduin Jaina are dead The remnants of the Horde hide out in Zandalar hidden from detection by Zandalari Magic while the Alliance remnants hide out on Kul Tiras.
The PC escapes Nzoth’s trap but while for the PC mere hours went by on Azeroth 5 years went by.
The expansion focuses on the PC slowly building up a coalition and working to retake Azeroth and preventing the Void lords from corrupting Azeroth completely while also dealing with Yrel and the Lightbound who Nzoth manipulated into coming to Azeroth as a backup plan to disrupt and distract the forces on Azeroth still fighting the Black empire.
The final raid is banishing the old gods from Azeroth into the Void Lords realm .
The last expansion deals with the rebuilding of Azeroth and cleansing the land from the Old gods influence a return to WoW classic dealing with local threats helping the population rebuild their lives with the last raid stopping an attempt by a surviving Black empire leader to bring the Old gods back to Azeroth
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I don’t get why people still want stuff destroyed so much… Destroying Southshore, Theramore, Undercity and Teldrassil hasn’t exactly made the world richer. Oh yeah, you might have that moment of investment into the story around the destruction, but that passes quickly, and what is left is just a poorer world, if you ask me. Planning to rebuild it at some point is great and all that, but with WoW we’re talking about years of looking at tentacly ruins where the stuff you liked stood, even if they greatly accellerated their usual rebuilding schedule.
That’s a big “no, thanks” from me.
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It could have – if Blizzard bothered to represent the ramifications of those events. I feel like I’m repeating this in pretty much every post I write but I kind of view this as a problem with their storytelling method. Telling the story through VIP characters rather than through the world. When Theramore was bombed the main consequence was that Jaina got a new hair colour and a thirst for Horde blood.
Theramore was an interesting place. They were somewhat neutral but then pushed into a conflict with the Horde. But this nexus of lore and storytelling potential was quite literally turned into an empty crater. Kind of a nice metaphor for the consequences of Blizzard’s brash narrative decisions.
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Well, I’ll agree that it could have been much more bearable. I don’t think it could ever be a plus for me personally, though. I’m in WoW for the world, not the story. I would much rather do a deep dive into old places or explore new wondrous places, than watch them change to something entirely different. I want to be the element of change within the world, the world itself might as well be relatively constant. If they want to give me a culture that is recovering from a WMD attack, I’d rather have them create a new one in a new place than bomb Theramore. But I guess I might be somewhat out of the mainstream on that…
Might be that I’m just burned one time too many by Blizzard’s incompetence, but by now I’m against about any major destruction they might do to anything.
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It would have been nice in bfa, losing to unleashed old god would make sense…
Losing this expansion would make sense too, but it would mean that we lose to Sylvanas = more of her in the future, more cgi cinematics with her etc etc…and i seriously cba this dumb plot armor mary sue character anymore.
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doesnt meen we need to loose to sylvanas, but for example when we fight her, the jailer is plotting and does something bad or messes up something realy bad, making both Azeroth and the shadowlands taking a mega blow, or even a crazy time loop where we come out in a totaly different time than we should be in, heck maby go so far back to stop Arthas from becomming the lichking.
“The hero’s journey” doesn’t really allow the heroes to be defeated. Only game where I can remember that the hero has been defeated and spawned its own timeline, is in the Zelda universe.
Would be good if for once we actually had a villain with a master plan that actually worked.
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…no, setbacks and defeats are a regular part of it. Death of the mentor, grand trial/revelation, first failure and all that. In trilogies like the original StarWars for example it’s actually expected to lose in the second installment. That’s what raises the stakes for the third.
Of course we can’t lose in “the end”. But we can certainly lose the main fight of one addon, and see the foe triumph - for a time.
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Set backs yes, though I’m more referring to the final outcome, when the villain and the hero finally squares off in the final showdown. In that outcome, the hero is never defeated. I’ve only seen the Zelda games actually expanding on a story line based on the hero’s fall. One could also say that there is part of that in Brandon Sanderson’s “The Final Empire”, though the hero have already fallen when the story begins and a new hero emerges.